DEAR FAMILY

A gentle, quietly narrated family story, rife with recognitions of hometown life during the Depression and war years in a small Massachusetts rural community. In 1935, when Ed Beane loses his job in Holyoke, it's his mother-in-law, Grandmother Howard, who insists that wife Dorothy, their two children—Ruthie, 13, and Virgil, 11—and Ed's mother, Granny Beane, move in with her and unmarried Cousin Vera in Dorothy's old home—a commodious house in the town of Havenhill with its acres of ill-used farmland. But suddenly Dorothy finds, once they've moved, that the old home doesn't measure up: ``Now all the things she cared about, the things that gave shape and meaning to her life were gone—a home of her own,'' friends, and social gatherings. And Grandmother Howard, a doyenne of order and domestic ritual, sets a formal tone that the Beanes carefully respect but resent. Ed particularly is humiliated in a subservient role. Until the 40's, when Ed finally achieves a hard-sought life's work, there will be failures and edgy intrafamilial and marital periods, but on a day in 1941, Granny Beane's birthday, Dorothy feels ``joy and contentment'' in a family finally meshed after those hard places have been made smooth. Then there's the march of generations, and tragedies begin—though by the close, Ed and Dorothy will find their real home. For those who remember rural New England Depression years, a treat with nostalgic recognitions—from hot summer suppers of peas and bread-and-butter to a winter town pageant, attended by such as ``old men in their Sunday suits with black overcoats folded across their knees.'' For others—a quiet chronicle from a vanished era couched in its mores and manners.